


notos

by mimesere



Series: an unbreakable house [2]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Disassociation, Gen, Post-Canon, edtjelvar week 2021, post blue veins recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:07:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28970319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimesere/pseuds/mimesere
Summary: To think, he’d once been considered charming.
Series: an unbreakable house [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125800
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19
Collections: EdTjelvar Week 2021





	notos

**Author's Note:**

> For Ed/Tjelvar week, day 2: sunlight.

Quiet wound its way uneasily through the main chamber of Aphrodite’s temple in Cairo, broken up only by the low murmurs of questions from the staff -- the familiar array of _how long were you with them_ and _when did you regain control_ \-- and the creak of leather armor and the clink of chain mail, muffled only a little by the tabards emblazoned with the sigils of Aphrodite and Apollo. As many people as were crowded into the room, there should have been more layers to the noise. The high, bare stone walls should have echoed back the rise and fall of conversations, no matter how quietly held; the shift and rustle of clothing should have followed the fidgeting of the impatient and uncomfortable. 

Instead, they sat and they waited and they watched. It made the clerics nervous. He supposed it hadn’t been long enough since autonomy had crashed over them like a wave and drowned them screaming under the weight of themselves for everyone else, everyone who’d avoided being brought into the fold, to feel entirely comfortable around them. It can’t have been pleasant to listen to if they had actually been screaming. He thought they might have been. At the very least, he thought he had been.

There was a part of him that couldn’t help but notice the paladins standing heavily armed and armored guard by the doors and calculating the best way to rush them if needed. The numbers were in their--

He took a deep breath and smothered the thought before it could go further. There was no them. He had no more idea what the gnome next to him was thinking than he had an idea of what he was going to do when -- if? -- when he was allowed back out of the temple. 

He’d had ideas once. Ambitions. The offers of work had come in by mail and teeth bared cordiality over dinner, mysteries and stories and the promise of history he could hold in his hands. They’d been scoured away, as inessential to the cause as a preference for honey in his tea. The thin, cracked shell of those dreams were in pieces inside him, littering the hollow space where everything he’d cared about had been repurposed into expansion and collaboration and nothing at all to do with him. He hadn’t found anything to fill it since he’d come back to himself.

He clasped his hands in his lap and looked away from the doors. 

The cleric coming down their row wore a white tabard emblazoned with the sun and was as lovely as everyone he’d ever seen in Apollo’s service. There was none of the ridiculous golden beauty that marked the paladins of Apollo, but there was something bright in her face, a light about the soft lines around her mouth and eyes and the grey streaked black hair pulled back into a tidy and efficient knot at the nape of her neck that drew his eye. Her hands were deft and her manner brisk and if she was uneasy with the dully delivered answers she was getting, it didn’t show. 

She made her way person by person closer, cupping her patient’s face in her hands and directing them to move. Up to look her in the face -- mostly they didn’t at all, just kept their eyes fixed downward or over her shoulder while they answered her questions -- and to the sides while she looked at the delicate skin of their necks and ears. She took their hands and examined their wrists and the bend of their elbows, anywhere their veins might show more clearly. Occasionally, a wash of light spilled over her and the person she was with, honey gold like a late summer’s afternoon. He could recall the image of it so clearly: the dig, his colleagues, that he’d been relegated to cataloguing after injuring himself in an unfortunate door-related accident. He remembered looking out from his tent and he remembered that everything had looked edged in gold. He could see it, it had happened, but it might as well have been a story he’d heard second or third hand. 

He couldn’t remember the smell of woodsmoke or the feel of sunlight against his skin; those things were gone, lost utterly and he felt all the colder for the realization. 

Two people away from him, she caught him watching and curiosity brightened her face. He dropped his eyes, embarrassment rising up in chest at having been caught staring, muted and distant but there nonetheless. How had he managed before? The burn of his own self-consciousness was intolerable, even as muted and far away as it was; he couldn’t bear the thought of feeling anything more than he already did. 

He focused instead on the almost empty pack at his feet. There were rations enough to last him days and he was certain he could find more. He’d managed to hold on to his anytool and ioun torch. They would be worth money if nothing else, but some part of him was loath to give them up. 

A pair of very sensible boots stepped into his view. He looked up at the cleric, who was studying him curiously. “Hello,” she said in a voice lower and rougher than he’d expected. She held out a hand and he surrendered his own to the loose clasp of her fingers around his wrist, counting the beats of his heart and comparing them against some standard unknown to him. 

Too late to escape awkwardness, he remembered that he was supposed to answer. “Hello,” he said, resigned to his own lack of grace. To think, he’d once been considered charming.

“How long were you with them?” she asked, kindly ignoring his stumbling. She pushed back the loose sleeves of his shirt and made a quiet noise in the back of her throat at the tracery of his barely visible, perfectly normal and healthy veins. 

“Just shy of two years,” he said. He wanted to pull his arm away from her, to pull his sleeve back down to cover it all. Doing that would make him look suspicious. Not doing that—

She hummed thoughtfully and let go his hand to cup his jaw and tilt his head to the side. Her fingers were warm and she applied only the lightest of pressure to get him to move as she wanted. He wondered if she could find some remnant of those months, indelible and accusatory. 

He’d been very effective at getting close to others, the cool gray of his skin providing camouflage until it was too late and a long history of aloof independence meant there was no one to recognize when his boundaries of self had collapsed. 

“And when did you regain control of yourself?”

“A month ago.” With everyone else, he didn’t say. His voice was still half-gone. She tilted his head to the other side. From the corner of his eye, he could see a mark on her wrist, coiling up her arm and hidden under her sleeve. 

He looked away and his eyes caught on the embroidery on her tabard. The familiar sun and lyre were picked out in shades of gold and orange and yellow, rich and dense. He wanted to touch it and feel the texture of the stitches under his fingertips. “How uniform are your, er, uniforms?” he asked.

She hesitated very briefly before resuming her examination. “Very. We like to be something of a matched set. Smart, you know?”

He did. It was what the cult of Apollo was known best for, after all. “Is the embroidery an indicator of rank? Seniority?”

“Mostly of a hobby. Needle and thread’s portable. It travels all right.” She smiled approvingly at him and he thought again, uselessly, of light. “And they don’t care so much as long as we’re upholding the standards of our order. Were you in England when it started?”

“Trinity College.” And then, for no good reason he could think of, he said, “I met a paladin of Apollo. Before.” 

“Did you now? Devastatingly beautiful, were they?” He made a sound of agreement and she touched the scar bisecting his mouth. “Is this from before or after?”

“Before.”

“Do you know why we like them to be pretty?” she asked as she found another scar, this one a gnarled knot on his shoulder. She raised her eyebrows at him.

“I assumed it was a preference of Apollo’s,” he said and she huffed a laugh. “After.”

“Some, yeah. People trust them more when they’re pretty,” she said. “They answer questions more easily. They forgive a bit of zealousness in the name of doing our duty.”

“Clever,” he said. _Untrue_ , he thought. At least in his experience. 

She hummed thoughtfully. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly given whose cleric she was, a very musical sort of hum and it pulled at the oldest and deepest and least used of the things he’d learned in his life. 

“And what was your paladin’s name?” she asked. Her hands were warm and that warmth seemed to spread out just under his skin, very like falling asleep in a patch of bright sunlight. 

Not mine, he wanted to say. He wanted to say that it was gone, buried under almost two years’ worth of indifference, but something about the familiar feel of her magic dragged the memory out and he said, “Edward.” Wrong. No. “Eddie.”

It felt, at that moment, as if the warmth pooling under his skin caught fire. It didn’t hurt, exactly; it was gone too quickly for anything to really register past the initial shock, but he was left blinking up at her, breathless and confused.


End file.
